PEAS! So many to choose from!

Peas are SoCal’s tasty winter legume!

First decide if you want flat, snap or the peas themselves, or ALL of the above! Flat peas are called snow peas – perfect for stir-fries. Snap peas have a thick pod and often don’t make it home from the garden. They are eaten on the spot! Shelling peas have a tough thin shell, but the peas inside are delish! These might be your on-the-table steamed peas, although a fresh shelled pea is mighty tasty the moment it is shelled! Poor little helpless things.

Like beans, peas come in bush and tall pole varieties!Plant bush and pole at the same time – bush come in faster, production time is shorter. When they are done, those pole peas will be right there ready for the picking next! You container gardeners will find some great dwarf varieties listed below!

ENGLISH SHELLING PEAS (bush and vine form) require more space and they have to be shelled. They have thin tough protective skins, and the peas are super easy to remove from the pods. Great pride goes with the bigger the number of peas per pod! There are dwarf and tall varieties and those that ripen early, mid- and late-season. Dwarf vines are Little Marvel, Progress No. 9 (Laxton’s Progress) and Greater Progress. These are all resistant to Fusarium wilt.

Larger vines like Freezonian are resistant to most pea diseases, including Fusarium wilt; Green Arrow, which is resistant to downy mildew, Fusarium wilt and other viruses; and Maestro, which is resistant to Mosaic virus, Fusarium wilt and other viruses.

Of the SNAP PEAS (thick edible pods) Sugar Snap is the most widely planted commercially in California. It is resistant to most diseases, grows to a height of 6 feet and is ready to harvest in about 70 days. Super Sugar Snap, SSS, is Stringless and resistant to powdery mildew! Sugar Ann is a 15- to 24-inch dwarf that is resistant to most diseases, including powdery mildew. It is ready to harvest in ONLY 56 days! Sweet Snap (semi-dwarf), Sugar Rae (dwarf), and Sugar Daddy (stringless, dwarf) are all resistant to powdery mildew.

Sugar Mel, a 2- to 3-foot tall variety, has been reported to be more heat tolerant than other sugar snaps. Plant them in February. Unlike the others, this pea needs warmer conditions to sprout successfully. It is resistant to powdery mildew and is ready to harvest in 60 to 70 days. Pea Lovers, be sure to get the seeds well in advance so you will have late season peas in the spring!Mangetout, a pea eaten as a vegetable with an edible pod. Of them, Spring Blush may be the prettiest!

You may have heard of Snow and Snap Peas as Mangetout, pronounce [MONJ] + [TOO] or mɑ̃ʒˈtu, a variety of pea eaten whole in its pod while still unripe. Spring Blush is lovely, a green snap pea with rose blush! The other amazing thing about the plants is their hyper-tendril habit—a new type in pea breeding. The tendrils are equally delicious to eat! You can get yellow and purple peas too! It’s fun for your mental palate to grow different colors!

Notice how many of these varieties are fusarium wilt resistant! All of Santa Barbara’s Community Gardens have this wilt in the soil, so be advised! The wilts are both soil and airborne.

If you are mindful of companions, you will find Peas are listed with several plants that in SoCal would be Summer plants whereas peas here are ‘Winter’ plants! Carrots are a great winter plant that enhance peas! Plant carrot seeds 3 weeks to a month before your peas. Carrots take awhile to germinate, and they grow slowly. Ideally you want them up before your peas. Peas grow up, carrots grow down. Frilly carrot leaves make living mulch for peas that have shallow roots and like moist soil. Water on the pea side of your planting. Too much water and carrots will split, but they both do like water. If you are just now planting and want those peas sooner than later, plant them both at once. The carrots will come along in time…

Presprouting your peas! The main good reason to do this is you are assured of sprouts! Peas planted where there were peas before have a natural inoculant in the ground and you are likely to get peas from seeds! If you are planting where none have been growing before, you need to buy and apply some inoculant to have better success. Or, you can sprout them at home so you can plant them with no empty spaces where ones didn’t come up. Transplants are no problem. They are already up. But if you want different varieties than available as transplants, you are back to starting from seeds.

Presprouting peas is super simple! Grab a plate, one piece of paper towel. Lay your towel so half of it is on the plate. Spritz it with good water, put your peas on the towel about an inch apart. Spritz them too! Fold the other half of the towel over them and spritz again. Put the plate in a warm place, not hot or in direct sunlight. Watch and wait. Keep them moist – not soaked, just moist or they may decompose/rot. Depending on temps, in about 4, 5 days you will have sprouts. Plan this ahead of time so they will be ready on the day you want to plant! Verrry gently plant them carefully, root down, so you don’t break off the sprouts. Plant them no more than a quarter inch deep, just covered. Keep your young plants consistently moist after planting.

Slugs and birds. Put down Sluggo or the like BEFORE you plant tiny precious seedlings or seeds! Slugs can mow them in one night. Pea seedlings are tender and carrots are so tiny! This is a time when over planting carrots is a good strategy. Theoretically the slugs can’t eat all your carrot seedlings…. A good thick row could act as a barrier, but, you will definitely be on your hands and knees thinning those little plants for your salad! If the pellets disappear, put down some more for second generation slugs. Keep watch.

Cover your seedlings with AVIARY wire as soon as your seedlings are in the ground. Birds love those fresh green morsels. A small flock of hungry winter birds can take the whole lot in moments. Once the plants are up, 8″ to a foot, you can try removing the wire. In our garden the birds still peck the leaves of the bigger plants, so my enclosure is about 1 1/2′ tall on both sides at the bottom of the trellis. In years when food and water are slim for the birds you may have to enclose the entire trellis.

Harvest tips! Once picked, peas lose their sugar within hours, so pick, shell and eat them as soon as possible. No problem.

Pick peas regularly to extend your harvest. Be careful – use two hands to pick the peas, one to hold the stem, the other to pick the pod. There is nothing so sad as to pull a producing vine from the ground accidentally. You can’t replant them. And that’s why you stake your trellis or cage so strongly to prevent them from blowing over in winter winds! Don’t lag getting your trellis up or installing your cage. Peas grow quickly, and keeping them off the ground keeps them out of reach of ground feeding insects, soil diseases, and gives a clean harvest.

Plant lots of them, different kinds – maybe try these gold snow peas, successively, every month or two! When I first started gardening veggies, a gardener said to me ‘You can never plant enough peas!‘ As a pea lover, I now know he was so right!

From Monticello.org: The English or Garden pea is usually described as Thomas Jefferson’s favorite vegetable because of the frequency of plantings in the Monticello kitchen garden, the amount of garden space devoted to it (three entire “squares”), and the character-revealing playfulness of his much-discussed pea contests: according to family accounts, every spring Jefferson competed with local gentleman gardeners to bring the first pea to the table; the winner then hosting a community dinner that included a feast on the winning dish of peas. Among the nineteen pea varieties Jefferson documented sowing were Early Frame, which was planted annually from 1809 until 1824…. more

1908 Shelling Peas by Swedish artist Carl Larsson. The artist’s wife Karin, dressed in a blue-patterned dress and white apron, shells peas with help from two of her children.

May you and your peas live long and prosper!

The Green Bean Connection started as correspondence for our SoCal Santa Barbara CA USA, Pilgrim Terrace Community Garden. All three of Santa Barbara city community gardens are very coastal. During late spring/summer we are in a fog belt/marine layer area most years, locally referred to as the May grays, June glooms and August fogusts. Keep that in mind compared to the microclimate niche where your veggie garden is.

Select the best varieties of these 3 popular winter plants – Chard, Broccoli, Peas!

Be gathering up your seeds now, start them mid August! Your transplants will go in the ground late September or October.

1) Chard is a super producer per square foot, also highly nutritious, and low, low calorie! Select early maturing varieties for eating sooner! It’s a cut-and-come-again plant. Keep taking the lower older leaves as they mature to the size you prefer!

Melt butter and olive oil together in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Stir in the garlic and onion, and cook for 30 seconds until fragrant. Add the chard stems and the white wine. Simmer until the stems begin to soften, about 5 minutes. Stir in the chard leaves, and cook until wilted. Finally, drizzle with lemon juice, sprinkle with Parmesan or your favorite grated cheese, or throw in fish or chicken pieces, or bacon bits, or pine nuts and cranberries, and toss! Salt or not to taste. Oh, yes.

2) Broccoli is super nutritious, a great antioxidant, and easy to grow.

Considered to be all season:

Cruiser (58 days to harvest; uniform, high yield; tolerant of dry conditions)

Green Comet (55 days; early; heat tolerant)

All Season F1 Hybrid is my current fav! The side shoots are abundant and big, easier and faster harvesting! The plants are low, they don’t shade out other plants, and compact, a very efficient footprint!

Sprouting Varieties:

Calabrese: Italian, large heads, many side shoots. Loves cool weather. Does best when transplanted outside mid-spring or late summer. Considered a spring variety (matures in spring). Disease resistant. 58 – 80 days

DeCicco: Italian heirloom, bountiful side shoots. Produces a good fall crop, considered a spring variety. Early, so smaller main heads. 48 to 65 days

Green Comet: Early-maturing (58 days) hybrid produces a 6-inch-diameter head and is very tolerant of diseases, heat tolerant.

Packman: Hybrid that produces a 9-inch-diameter main head in 53 days. Excellent side-shoot production.

3) PEASare because you love them! They come in zillions of varieties. Plant LOTS! I plant some of each, the English shelling peas in a pod, snow or Chinese flat-pod peas, and the snap peas that are fat podded crisp snacks that usually don’t make it home from the garden! Snow and snaps are great in salads. Well, so are shelled peas! Snow peas can be steamed with any veggie dish or alone. Fresh English peas require the time and patience to hull them, but are SO tasty who cares?!

For more varieties info, clickhere
F is Fusarium resistant, AAS is All America Selection, PM is Powdery Mildew resistant

China, snow, or sugar

F Dwarf Grey Sugar

F Mammoth Melting Sugar

Snap (thick, edible pods)

AAS, PM Sugar Ann (dwarf)

PM Sweet Snap (semi-dwarf)

PM Sugar Rae (dwarf)

PM Sugar Daddy (stringless, dwarf)

AAS Sugar Snap

Whether you get these exact varieties or not, mainly, I’m hoping you will think about how different varieties are, of any kind of plant, whether that plant is suitable for your needs, if it has disease resistance/tolerance, heat/frost tolerance, if it is an All America Selection, what its days to maturity are. A few extra moments carefully looking at that tag or seed pack can be well worth it.